Cloud DNS

In the last lesson, we learnt about load balancers and how to select the appropriate load balancer depending upon the origin of traffic and layer at which you want to manage the traffic.

In this lesson, we will look at the service which makes the Internet a happy world by allowing us to use text-based identifiers for the servers. We will look at the “Cloud DNS”. Cloud DNS is not that much important topic because it is pretty standard service and if you have previous experience of hosting a website with a custom domain you might have worked with DNS previously.

Introduction#

Google Cloud DNS is a scalable, reliable, and managed authoritative Domain Name System(DNS) service running on the same infrastructure as Google. It has low latency, high availability, and is a cost-effective way to make your application and services available to users. Cloud DNS translates domain names like www.google.com into IP addresses like 172.217.14.78. Cloud DNS is programmable. You can easily publish and manage millions of DNS zones and records using a single user interface, command-line interface, or API.

Key features#

Cloud DNS is the only GCP product that guarantees 100% uptime. Apart from this Cloud DNS:

• Can support a very large number of zones and DNS records per zone. You can say in millions.

• Can be managed using UI, gcloud command utility, or using the REST APIs. To manage using APIs you need to enable “Cloud DNS API”.

• Provides private zones for more security. This is helpful for managing a private google cloud network.

• Provides DNS peering and DNS forwarding to share DNS data and to establish a hybrid connection between on-premise and google cloud.

• For private DNS, it logs a record for every DNS query received from VMs and inbound forwarding flows within your networks. So, that we can keep a track of all the activities.

Accessing UI#

Open the Main menu> Network services > Cloud DNS.

• Click on Create zone. DNS Zones are the containers for DNS records for the same DNS or website name.

• Cloud DNS provides 2 types of zones. Private and public. For public zones, you need to verify your ownership of the domain name.

• Private hosted zone is used for managing a private google cloud network.

If you have a domain as of now you can host it using the Cloud DNS. You need to create different records once you create a hosted zone. We will not go deeper into hosting a domain.

But for knowledge, you can look at the below screenshot of the sample hosted domain.

• The type A record is where your DNS name is mapped to the server IP address which is running your code.

Other records are for nameservers and providing support and domain verification.

For the exam, you can expect only one question on Cloud DNS. That too a straightforward like, “You want to manage the domain of your website using google cloud. Which service will you use?”

This is enough for the exam about Cloud DNS. Now that we have covered almost all three pillars of cloud computing, let’s see how we can estimate the cost of architecture before it is created. The next step would be to look at the pricing calculator and estimate the cost of one simple architecture.